Local and national Chinese TV has been full of news stories about the terrible drought affecting southwest China: Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi. Peasants scooping spoonfuls of muddy water from dried wells; entire families scrabbling deep into caves to collect teat-fulls of water formed by condensation from stalactites; long lines on towns-folk queuing at trucks loaded with bottled water, sent by city governments as far away as Suzhou and Shanghai.

News footage also shows something even more disturbing to me than thirsty children, faces smeared with dirt: the sheer, uncontrolled waste of what will be the most precious resource China has squandered on an unprecedented scale: water. Army soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army march into townships and turn on fire hoses connected to container trucks to spray jet-fulls of water into fields that gulp down the precious fluid like a man stranded in a desert for weeks; delivery trucks disperse boxes of bottled water that children gleefully chug at in front of waiting cameras; city fathers splash buckets-full of water drawn up from stressed wells into waiting plastic basins, liquid splashing onto the ground and onto the arms and faces of happy villagers.

The systematic waste and the lack of even a modicum of thought or habit in China for conservation of water, valuation of its forests, and too-rapid industrialization will prove challenges far greater to its leadership than whether America will continue to accept cheap Chinese-made sneakers onto its shores. All too soon.

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